It is in the nature of large fortunes to diminish rapidly, when subdivided and distributed.  A million is the unit of wealth, now and here in America.  It splits into four handsome properties; each of these into four good inheritances; these, again, into scanty competences for four ancient maidens,—­with whom it is best the family should die out, unless it can begin again as its great-grandfather did.  Now a million is a kind of golden cheese, which represents in a compendious form the summer’s growth of a fat meadow of craft or commerce; and as this kind of meadow rarely bears more than one crop, it is pretty certain that sons and grandsons will not get another golden cheese out of it, whether they milk the same cows or turn in new ones.  In other words, the millionocracy, considered in a large way, is not at all an affair of persons and families, but a perpetual fact of money with a variable human element, which a philosopher might leave out of consideration without falling into serious error.  Of course, this trivial and, fugitive fact of personal wealth does not create a permanent class, unless some special means are taken to arrest the process of disintegration in the third generation.  This is so rarely done, at least successfully, that one need not live a very long life to see most of the rich families he knew in childhood more or less reduced, and the millions shifted into the hands of the country-boys who were sweeping stores and carrying parcels when the now decayed gentry were driving their chariots, eating their venison over silver chafing-dishes, drinking Madeira chilled in embossed coolers, wearing their hair in powder, and casing their legs in long boots with silken tassels.

There is, however, in New England, an aristocracy, if you choose to call it so, which has a far greater character of permanence.  It has grown to be a caste,—­not in any odious sense;—­but, by the repetition of the same influences, generation after generation, it has acquired a distinct organization and physiognomy, which not to recognize is mere stupidity, and not to be willing to describe would show a distrust of the good-nature and intelligence of our readers, who like to have us see all we can and tell all we see.

If you will look carefully at any class of students in one of our colleges, you will have no difficulty in selecting specimens of two different aspects of youthful manhood.  Of course I shall choose extreme cases to illustrate the contrast between them.  In the first, the figure is perhaps robust, but often otherwise,—­inelegant, partly from careless attitudes, partly from ill-dressing,—­the face is uncouth in feature, or at least common,—­the mouth coarse and unformed,—­the eye unsympathetic, even if bright,—­the movements of the face are clumsy, like those of the limbs,—­the voice is unmusical,—­and the enunciation as if the words were coarse castings, instead of fine carvings.  The youth of the other aspect is commonly